[Tip] Search for 3 letter words by wrapping with asterisks (ie. for bug use *bug*)

[Digital Doctor]

I stumbled upon a method of searching for 3 letter words here at xenforo.com

Forinstance if you try to search for:
bug

you'll get this error.
XenForo Community - Error
The search could not be completed because the search keywords were too short, too long, or too common.

however ....
*bug*

bug*
works ! (demo)
Hope that helps

Update: I see Forsaken mentioned this tip as well

3 letters do not work due to MySQL requiring a minimum of 4. You can bypass this by doing CMS* which will display results.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Other examples:

To search for posts with the number 3 in the title:
Search for: **3**

To search for posts with CMS in the title:
Search for: CMS*

 

[Digital Doctor]

Of course, one idea for xenforo would be that instead of letting the three letter word searches fail .... automatically add a * to the end of the search word !

as well, you can bypass this problem ... by editing the MySQL configuration file
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xf-search-engine.1143/

http://xenforo.com/community/thread...ext-minwordlength-setting-in-the-admin.11075/

 

[Brett Peters]

I must admit I have been using site:xenforo.com search term in google a bit lately.

Cheers, I shall give this a try

 

[swatme]

i realized we can search the word "IP" in xenforo.com
how was that possible if theres a 3 letter limit?

 

[Paul B]

There's no minimum word limit on XenForo.com.

 

[swatme]

oh i see.
whats the tradeoff of setting the min word length in my.cnf to zero?
will the mysql load usage increase?

 

[digitalpoint]

Well it would certainly take more resources (memory and disk space) on your server the lower you set the min word length to, but not remarkably so. Personally, I stick with 3 character minimum because I don't really find a lot of 2 letter words I need to search for, and there are a LOT of them ("is", "it", "an", etc.) that creates a pretty big index. But I'm also dealing with 17,000,000+ posts, (and a ton of other searchable content types... PMs, users, etc.)

So in my case, the benefit of a 2 character minimum word length isn't greater than the resources required to maintain it, so I just forgo it.